When I was a little girl, I used to save up my allowance for family excursions to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where I proceeded to purchase such dazzling exotica as hand-painted fans, little plaster statues of animals, and shiny bits of jewelry. Little did I know that all these years later, my skill for finding gimcrack treasures would be put to good use in Seville’s endless collection of Chinese discount bazaars. ​

San Francisco's Chinatown, by nutmegnotebook.com

It all started with a casual remark to Rich. “You know how nobody can ever remember the right order for the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas?’” I said. “What if we got some props, things we could use as visual aids to show which verse comes next. Might be fun for the 25th when everyone comes to lunch.”

Rich, who was deep into the mountain of paperwork he was collecting for the renewal of our Spanish residency permits, said something like, “Mmmph.” Which I took to be assent. And I was off and running.

If you didn’t grow up in America, where this song blasts out of shopping mall loudspeakers throughout the holidays, you may not know that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is an old English carol in the form of a cumulative chant, that is, a song where each verse is built on top of the last. It starts like this:​

On the first day of Christmasmy true love sent to mea partridge in a pear tree.

On the second day of Christmasmy true love sent to metwo turtle dovesand a partridge in a pear tree.

On the third day of Christmas​my true love sent to methree French hens,two turtle dovesand a partridge in a pear tree.

You get the idea. The twelve days mark the interval between Christmas and the feast of the Three Kings, and by the time that happy day rolls around, the singer’s true love has acquired 364 gifts. I don’t know if anyone tabulated the cost in 1780 when the song was first published, but today buying all those presents and hiring drummers and pipers and so on would run you a hefty $155,407.18. I was hoping to come in considerably under that budget, say somewhere in the tens of euros. Hence the visits to Seville's wildly popular Chinese discount bazaars.

One of Seville's countless Chinese bazaars

​One of the great things about being abroad for the holidays is that it requires a whole new level of resourcefulness. Back home in the USA, I would simply have mail ordered a boxed set of 12-days-of-Xmas ornaments or visited a single crafts shop for everything needed to make my own. Here I had to pick through jumbles of dusty objects on obscure shelves in the dim recesses of a dozen stores; it wasn’t a shopping trip, it was a quest. Each time I found something — even those that are, frankly, pretty strange and hideous — it felt like a triumph.

What we wound up with is not a perfectly matched set of theme-appropriate decorative objects. It’s a crazy cornucopia of toys, housewares, and knickknacks, some of which are so outlandish they make my childhood purchases in San Francisco’s Chinatown seem downright sensible. But I can say this with certainty: no one has a “Twelve Days of Christmas” set like ours. And so long as keep the wine flowing freely, I am sure our friends will love them.